10 Sunday readings

My sunday morning Look at the incompetence, corruption and policy failures:

• Emergency Contingent: My Fake Job in Preparation for Y2K. It was a fake job because Andersen was faking it. The firm spent the late 1990s certifying fraudulent financial statements from Enron, the Texas-based energy company that made financial derivatives a buzzword, until that company went bankrupt in a cloud of scandal and suicide, and Andersen was convicted of obstruction of justice and turned himself in. accounting licenses and shutters. But that was later. (N+1)

• The man who made Nike uncool: Instead of turning the sneaker giant into a high-tech powerhouse, John Donahoe pissed off his partners and disappointed fans. (Business Week)

• How inflation fooled almost everyone: With rates cutting for the first time in years, what have we learned about the economic disruptions of the pandemic era? (New Yorker)

• Xi sparks a crisis for millions of China’s highest-paid workers: China has created a professional class in record time. Now, just as quickly, many of their dreams are crushed. (Bloomberg)

• Georgia’s network of election officials strategizing to undermine the 2024 outcome: Emails reveal Georgia Election Integrity Coalition, a group of election officials and deniers coordinating in swing state. terrifying. (The Guardian)

• One million are now dead or injured in the Russia-Ukraine war: Heavy losses on both sides create problems on the battlefield and accelerate demographic fears. (Wall Street Journal)

• How Roberts shaped Trump’s Supreme Court winning streak: Behind the scenes, the chief justice shaped three important January 6 and election cases that helped determine the former president’s fate. (New York Times) but see I helped John Roberts build his image as a centrist. I was so wrong. The character that John Roberts plays as an amiable centrist steward of the court’s reputational interests – largely created in the press and played to the hilt by himself – is total fiction. It was Roberts who decided that Trump and Trumpism would prevail in all three insurrection cases, and he did not, in this case, follow the aggressive conservative maximalists of the court. He was an aggressive conservative maximalist. And he created majority opinions in his own image. (Slate)

• “Pig butchering” scams have cost Americans billions. This lawyer takes them on. Prosecutor Erin West was one of the few who had any success against criminals committing a new type of fraud. (Wall Street Journal)

• Elon Musk is degrading American society: He not only allows the troll; he personally endorses their posts. (The Atlantic)

• How to Avoid Trump (and Other Politicians): Sanewashing is the act of packaging radical and outrageous statements in a way that makes them seem normal. Here’s how reporters can avoid it. (Poynter) see also Trump is 78 and barely coherent. Where are all those who questioned Biden’s age and fitness? Where are the headlines that scream, “Disturbed old man peddles nonsense as he threatens to violently deport immigrants”? (USA Today)

Be sure to check out our Master of Business this week with Victor Khosla, Founder and CIO of Strategic Value Partners. The firm manages $19 billion of client assets across a range of global private credit, distressed debt, hard assets (RE, infrastructure, aircraft, power plants) and event driven opportunities. He established proprietary trading desks at both Citi and Merrill Lynch, served as chairman of Cerberus Capital, and led MooreSVP, a joint venture with Moore Capital.

It took 75 years for a 75% adoption rate of the flush toilet. Smartphones took 10 years to achieve the same

Source: @MikeZaccardi

Sign up here for our read-only mailing list.

~~~

To find out how these readings are assembled each day, please see this.

The post 10 Sunday Readings appeared first on The Big Picture.